Ask your doctor if moral hazard is right for you
This illustrates one of the massive inefficiencies that gets built into our massively inefficient health care system by the invidious relationship that can develop between the interests of Big Pharma and those of advocacy groups pushing for “awareness” of their cause.
About ten years ago I attended an event hosted by a couple of medical academics. It was a concert at a pretty big auditorium in Denver, and the invitees were almost all participants in the academics’ prostate cancer research trials (I was there for other reasons). This was before I had begun to study the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the obesity panic, and I remember thinking at the time, who is paying for all this? (The event was on a scale that must have cost well into six figures). That’s not a question I would ask today.
Thanks for that link, Paul, which btw is not actually in the post (cut and paste required). I’m on the pointy edge on this one. Older (63) with a father who was diagnosed with prostate cancer and underwent really horrible radiation which more or less wrecked the last years of his life. What killed him was bone cancer possibly stemming from the prostate cancer, probably not. His doctor, an oncologist, also treated my aunt after she suffered a serious head injury in a hurricane related accident. She died and her death certificate said she died of breast cancer, the one thing every one sure she did not die of. But the jerk doctor was an oncologist so everyone had cancer and everyone died from it. Sure made him rich.
Medicine being what it is in SW FL, if I need specialist care I go somewhere else.
The problem, as is so often the case, is money. Pharm companies have it. For us low-profit pediatricians (not big targets of the pharm crew for that reason), ongoing continuing medical education (and even patient education) is frequently funded by formula companies. Until someone decides to divert some public money to this, the pharm (and formula) companies are going to fill that need. Advertising just makes it obvious.